Midnight Taxi Tango (15 page)

Reza

S
moke?” Rohan says.

And why the fuck not? We're flying along the Long Island Expressway in the Partymobile. It's almost midnight. I roll down the window and turn up the radio, some soca station Rohan insisted on, where the DJ keeps interrupting the music to shout out all his cousins. Rohan puts two unfiltered Conejos in his mouth, lights them both, and hands me one.

“Nervous?” he says.

“No, man. Why?” I can't remember the last time I felt nervous before a hit. Yes, this one's different in a way—the beginning of Charo's new war on a few strategically selected targets he's deemed worthy of utter destruction—but if anything, a new lightness has taken over me since we made it out of that suburban Queens hell house a few hours ago. Carlos didn't look so good when we parted, worry for his family etched across his face. But me? I felt that old ease begin to seep back into my bones.

Angie is still all over me. Her smile still haunts every few thoughts, but I feel lighter now. We take revenge in the name of those that have fallen, but really, I think it's just for us. Angie's gone. I'm the one left carrying the charge of her memories.

Rohan lets out a smoke ring. “You're smiling. And you reek of smoke and insecticide.”

“It's been a weird night,” I say. I showered twice, dressed and spritzed on plenty of my favorite cologne before running out the door, and I was only seven minutes late to meet the others and looking sharp. But some smells don't scrub off easy.

A tap comes from the other side of the partition. “Ay, we close?”

I push the button, and the thick glass doorway slides open behind us. “'Bout fifteen minutes,” I say.

Bri pokes her head up. “Can we stop for coffee?” She's all made-up, pretty brown flesh spilling out of a tight blouse. A cloud of flowery girl fragrance fills the front seat.

Rohan looks at me. I shake my head. “We cuttin' it close as is.”

Bri makes her pouty face in the rearview at me. “Memo's back here putting me to sleep with his frickin' life story.”

“Hey!” Memo yells from the darkness.

“That's weird,” Rohan says. “Memo never says shit to me.”

Bri rolls her eyes. “You ain't cute like me.”

I take my half-full coffee cup from the holder and pass it back to Bri. “Finish mine. I don't want it.”

“Word? Thanks, Rez. You the best!”

“It's black though. No sugar.”

“Ugh! Whatever.” Bri sips at it, scrunches up her face, and then retreats into the back.

“It's always something,” I mutter.

Rohan shakes his head. “Sure you're not nervous?”

• • •

The swell of the ocean grows louder as we roll down a series of dark streets.

Rohan taps the partition door. “Getting close.”

It slides open, and Memo's big head appears. “You want Bri up front?”

“Yeah,” Rohan says. “I'm coming back.”

It takes some wrangling, but Rohan manages to squeeze his bulky frame through the small doorway. Bri ducks into the front a few seconds later and slumps into the passenger seat with a groan.

“Coffee didn't work?” I ask.

She rubs her eyes. “There's no stopping that guy. I just nodded off at some point around the third grade. Nobody even asked for his damn life story. I just said ‘How ya been?'”

“Damn.”

“Never. Again.”

We drive a few more minutes in silence, and then a massive concrete wall looms out of the darkness. “This is it,” I say.

As usual, Charo's description is spot-on:
There'll be a guard booth beside the gate. The booth is lit with a dark red light. That glass? Bulletproof. The gate? Reinforced steel. Cannot be broken through. Try to ram it, your crumpled corpse will be returned to me riddled with bullet holes and your dead ass will owe me twenty G's for the trash heap you turned the Partymobile into.

I hit play on the CD player and an ecstatic techno beat blasts out, punctuated by shrill inebriated giggles. I have no idea where he got this track, but it really does sound like I'm driving a van full of wasted party girls. I roll up to the guard station.

If you fuck up and have to waste the front guard, don't bother going through with it. They got cameras all over him, and by the time you figure out how to get the gate open, you'll be dead.

A stern face emerges from the red-tinged darkness.

I smile. “Brought the entertainment.” Beside me, Bri adjusts, ready to let loose her cleavage and giggles, but the guard just nods and then the gate groans and swings grudgingly open.

If you fuck up when you're inside, you're all gonna die. Once that gate closes behind you, you gotta make it to the
building at the far end of the lot without alerting the front guard that you're making a move. He's got monitors in his booth and he's watching everything that happens in the lot.

I swing the Partymobile in a wide circle and back toward the doorway of the building. My backup lights throw luminous splashes across the open lot, then the plain cement wall, then a single tall figure in a black suit. His hand is raised. He's . . . helping me park.

“Should I waste him?” Memo asks from the back.

“You heard Charo,” I say. “They got eyes on us. You waste him, it's over.”

“So what's the move?”

“Hang on.” I swing the wheel hard, bringing the van in at a sharp angle, and the guy waves his hands in agitated circles. “Left!” he yells. “Cut left!” Then he runs to the other side of the van so I can see him in the rearview mirror. “Pull up and let's try it again,” he says from the doorway. Right where I want him. I throw it into drive, swing forward hard and then lurch backward so fast he has to scramble into the entranceway.

“Jesus, lady! Where'd you learn how to drive?”

A sliver of red light opens in front of me, back at the gate. “You good, Silo?” the front guard yells across the darkness.

I wait a beat, holding my breath. Bri smacks her bubble gum beside me.

“Yeah, just another bitch that doesn't know how to drive.”

“Alright.” The light disappears and our back doors fly open. I hear the curt whisper of Memo's silencer and then a shuffle of motion.

Don't take out the guard at the front door either, not right away. You need him to get you in the elevator.

Memo, I'm sure, put a bullet in the guy's gun arm, and Rohan followed it up with a solid crack across the face. When those two get in the zone, they're like a pair of impenetrable brick walls with one deadly mind. I kill the engine.
The darkness in front of us remains unbroken. Bri and I trade a look and then pop open our doors.

Inside, the guard is slumped against the wall, glaring defiantly at the pistol Rohan has pointed at his temple. He clutches a bloody spot on his right arm, but the mess isn't bad, just a few drops, which means Memo took care to miss the artery.

“Take us up,” I say. The guard growls and then straightens himself and leads us down a narrow, dimly lit corridor. At the far end, an elevator waits beside two doorways. One leads to the front stairs, and the other goes into a lounge area with a back stairwell at the far end.

The cameras in the elevator gotta go. It's only a minute and a half ride, so by the time they figure out something is wrong you'll be in their midst. If you don't take out the cameras, they'll see it's you and not the girls and when the door opens you'll face a roomful of guns.

Rohan and Bri disappear into the doorway without a word. Memo reaches up into the elevator and crushes the camera with one hand, then shoves the guard in. I follow. Push the 2 button.

This is the moment when everything could go wrong. We're separated. We're relying on someone else's inadequacy and the promise that this elevator won't deliver us to certain death. None of this is to my liking, but there's always a moment when you have to give up control—those dizzy silent seconds before the storm. I adjust my collar, unholster my handgun, and tap the knife strapped to my ankle, the gas mask on my thigh.

Everything is in place.

“You good?” Memo says under his breath.

“Perfect,” I say.

With a calm electronic
ding
, the elevator door slides open to reveal four tall men, their guns pointed directly at us.

The first shot is mine. It tears through Silo's head and then shatters the chin of the guy directly across from me. The world explodes as Memo and I fall back against opposite
walls of the elevator and Silo's body is decimated by gunfire before he drops. There were six counting Silo; now there are four. Memo is hit—a hole in his suit trickles blood down his shoulder, but it doesn't look bad. Memo either hasn't noticed or doesn't care.

If they were stupid they'd come one by one and we'd pick them off. It's easy to get cocky when you have your enemy cornered into a twelve-foot death box. They're not stupid though. I hear them shuffling backward, overturning tables as they retreat to defensive positions. The automatic doors close on what's left of Silo, make a squishing noise, open again. I steal a glance and then duck back as a hail of bullets ricochet off the steel elevator walls.

Memo already has his chemical grenade out. I give him the nod as I'm pulling my mask out. Memo doesn't wear masks in these situations—some high-intensity military training he did that makes him feel that much cooler than the rest of us. Dude can wade into a cloud of biological hellfire and come right back out with barely a sniffle. His aim sucks though, which is why his big imprecise ass gets to play with the big imprecise-type weapons. He chucks the grenade into the room as another barrage of gunfire bursts out.

Usually, this is when folks panic.
Oh shit, a grenade!
And various other unhelpful responses. This one's already spilling out its foul milky haze, and in less than a minute it'll fill the room. These guys are good though. They really are. They haven't yelled once since we arrived, no boastful threats, nothing. And now the silence lets me know they're not fucking around. When I peek, one of them is bum-rushing the grenade. He's not gonna jump on it and take one for the team like they do in movies. He's gonna drop-kick that thing directly back into the elevator, where it'll fuck our vision to pieces. Gas mask or not, paramilitary training or not, an elevator full of smoke will make us an easy target. It'll be game over.

Very, very over.

I'm raising my gun when a chunk of the guy's head explodes upward. He slides to the ground, lands twitching. Bri stands in the doorway behind him, gun out, and then ducks back as bullets splatter the wall around her. It's too late though: the smoke has done its thing. The room becomes an impenetrable, empty fog.

• • •

We don't have much time.

The gunfight will have sent the primary targets into a scatter. They're in a room down the hall from here, presumably with three other armed guards. One will probably bust through the far door in another couple seconds. He'll be heavily armed, one of the paras, and probably more than a little panicked to find the place thick with chemical smoke. The other two bodyguards will escort the conglomerate rep and the warlord down a back stairwell and then make a break for their armored cars.

No one gets out alive,
Charo told us.
No one.

I holster the Glock and crouch low, loosening the dagger from its ankle sheath. Close combat and near blindness is no time to be shooting. I duck out of the elevator, cut a hard left, and then stride through the smoke in the direction of the closest 'cuda gunman, staying low. He'd been crouching behind a toppled wooden table. He appears suddenly out of the fog, turning toward me as he wipes at his watering eyes with one hand and waves his gun with the other. I catch his gun wrist lest he try anything cute while he's dying and then jam my blade up through the soft meat of his jaw and into his brain. He drops as I hear the far door swing open across the room—that'll be the bodyguard. I crouch and inch forward. Someone yells, “¿Qúe carajo?” and I hit the deck. Another 'cuda guy comes flailing out of the smoke just as machine-gun fire explodes through the room, eviscerating
him. The 'cuda's top half flails forward over his tattered midsection, spraying me with innards; then he drops to his knees and crumples on top of me.

Presuming they're not hit, Rohan and Bri will be converging on the gunman now. Memo's probably somewhere down low, making sure no one has a pulse. I crawl forward, reach the edge of the room just in time to see Bri emerge from the smoke, gas mask on, gun pointed at the bodyguard's temple. He swings around a second too late—her bullet cuts through skin, skull, and brain and explodes out the far side of his head in a splatter of red and pink. He drops.

I stand, nod at Bri, and turn back into the fog. “Memo?”

His voice comes from the floor a few feet to my right. “Aquí.” Then he rises out of the fog, still maskless, like some hulking angel of death.

“Rohan went back down the stairwell to head them off,” Bri reports.

“Good. Memo, make sure everything's clean up here. Bri, come.”

We're halfway down the stairs when my phone vibrates. Charo usually doesn't call during hits, but I tap my earpiece one time to answer in case there's a change of plans. “Go.”

“Uh . . . hello?” It's a girl's voice. Vaguely familiar. I pull off my gas mask. Last time I answer during a job without checking the number. “Is this Reza?”

Ah, yes. “Listen, Carlos's little friend, right?”

“This a bad time?”

Ha. But there's something in her voice that catches me. She's terrified. There's no imaginable way she'd be so polite if this wasn't serious. “Very. What's wrong?”

Bri shoots me a concerned look as we reach the first floor. She puts her ear against the door leading out to the front corridor.